June 10, 2017

Creativity as sovereign

The Bridge--MC

Africa—MC

I cite these two recent paintings of mine — ‘The Bridge’ having been done yesterday and ‘Africa’ a few days earlier — as examples of how creativity has often nothing to do with one’s state of mind. Both were done despite rather overwhelming restiveness and disquiet in my mind.

One might argue that the idyll of the two imagined scenes are an aspirational visualization by a mind buffeted terrible mundane problems. It is possible that the idyll on paper is an escape from the hubbub in my mind. As the great Ghalib said “Jee dhundhta hai phir wahi fursat ke raat din…” (Mind longs for days and nights of leisure...) I too am searching for those and finding them in imagination.

When it comes to poetry, something I have written for over four decades, I am convinced that in my case it is a sovereign endeavor in the sense that it has nothing to do with what I feel. I cannot find more than a handful of ghazals—if even that—from my collection that consciously or subconsciously capture my state of mind at the time of writing. In that sense, poetry for me is a mechanical process.

Painting, something I began only four years ago, may still have some grounding in what one is feeling but increasingly that too has begun to become sovereign. The two works here are examples of that.

What was the point of this post? Well, like I have said many times before it is not as if you pay me to read.

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Creativity as sovereign

The Bridge--MC

Africa—MC

I cite these two recent paintings of mine — ‘The Bridge’ having been done yesterday and ‘Africa’ a few days earlier — as examples of how creativity has often nothing to do with one’s state of mind. Both were done despite rather overwhelming restiveness and disquiet in my mind.

One might argue that the idyll of the two imagined scenes are an aspirational visualization by a mind buffeted terrible mundane problems. It is possible that the idyll on paper is an escape from the hubbub in my mind. As the great Ghalib said “Jee dhundhta hai phir wahi fursat ke raat din…” (Mind longs for days and nights of leisure...) I too am searching for those and finding them in imagination.

When it comes to poetry, something I have written for over four decades, I am convinced that in my case it is a sovereign endeavor in the sense that it has nothing to do with what I feel. I cannot find more than a handful of ghazals—if even that—from my collection that consciously or subconsciously capture my state of mind at the time of writing. In that sense, poetry for me is a mechanical process.

Painting, something I began only four years ago, may still have some grounding in what one is feeling but increasingly that too has begun to become sovereign. The two works here are examples of that.

What was the point of this post? Well, like I have said many times before it is not as if you pay me to read.